White House report: Overhaul VA’s ‘corrosive culture’

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ “corrosive culture” can only be fixed by a near overhaul of the system, charged a report delivered to President Barack Obama on Friday.

The report, authored by a top White House official, said the department needs to be “restructured and reformed” and shared a scathing view of a corrupt and poorly-managed agency keen to protect itself over the care of veterans.

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“A corrosive culture has led to personnel problems across the Department that are seriously impacting morale and by extension, the timeliness of health care,” the report states. “The problems inherent within an agency with an extensive field structure are exacerbated by poor management and communication structures, distrust between some VA employees and management, a history of retaliation toward employees raising issues, and a lack of accountability across all grade levels.”

These newest allegations are added trouble for the embattled department, which is facing heavy criticism for extensive wait times for veterans seeking medical care, a scandal that forced then-Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign.

The reports grew so severe that Obama was forced to dispatch in May a top deputy, Rob Nabors, to study the medical care systems within the VA and recommend specific ways to combat its problems.

Nabors, the deputy chief of staff, has been asked “to continue to assist the department during this time of transition,” the White House said.

The White House-led report found that the VA’s 14-day scheduling standard — a rule which bans VA hospitals from keeping patients from seeing a doctor for longer than two weeks — are “ill-defined.” This standard may have contributed, Nabors found, to the VA falsifying wait lists for veterans.

“There is a tendency to transfer problems rather than solve problems,” the report found. “This is in part due to the difficulty of hiring and firing in the federal government.”

The report also charged that the VA was slow to adapt to changing demographics among veterans, including an influx of female patients and younger veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have different needs than traditional patients.

Nabors recommends that the VA train additional doctors, nurses and other health care staff to help decrease wait times for veterans.

But the White House did note that the VA has made strides since the wait lists became public.

The White House says the agency scheduled 182,000 appointments and allocated nearly $400 million toward accelerated care. The department also launched a comprehensive review of its whistle-blower system after employees said they were punished when internally airing concerns over standards of care.

The report was met with mixed reactions from Congress, though lawmakers in both chambers said they were ready to work with the Obama administration to tackle the problems within the VA.

“While it’s extremely unfortunate President Obama did not heed our warnings about the very real and very deadly problems within the VA health care system sooner, we stand ready to work with stakeholders inside and outside the administration to institute VA reforms that will improve services to America’s veterans while bringing real accountability and efficiency to the department,” said Florida Republican Rep. Jeff Miller, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

“Our job as a Congress and as a nation is to make the necessary changes so that every veteran in the VA system gets the quality and timely health care they are entitled to,” Sanders said.

Sander and Miller are among two dozen members working on a House and Senate conference committee to craft a reform bill. That legislation will likely include broader authority for the VA secretary to fire employees for misconduct and give veterans the ability to seek care outside the VA system if they’ve been waiting longer than 30 days for medical care.